The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [103]
‘Why should he? He would think it funny if I didn’t go.’
‘Oh, well. I just thought.’ Betty wandered up the Edgware Road, maddeningly slow in the cold wind, knocking into people as she veered short-sightedly off her course. ‘I just thought he might not like to feel that you were checking up on him.’
‘But I’m not!’
Or was she? It was natural for her to go to the Excelsior for lunch. She was glad that Joe worked in a place where she could go every day; but she had to admit that she was glad not only because it gave her a chance to see him, but because she could reassure herself that he had not yet walked out of the job, as he had walked impatiently out of so many others.
He did not seem to mind this job as much as some of the others he had tried. He liked to make sandwiches and cut wedges of pie, and wear the white jacket and the little square white hat which sat so jauntily on the back of his glossy head. He was much more cheerful than he had been at other times when he was working. Most men are at odds with themselves when they are out of work. Joe was usually at odds with himself when he was tied down to the routine of a job.
The cheerfulness was partly due to a new scheme that he was concocting with Jack Corelli. Jack was speaking for the Communists at the moment, and although his impassioned oratory against the evils of capitalism drew big crowds at Marble Arch, and kept a policeman hovering near, he had never been more capitalistically minded himself. He had his eye on a little restaurant in St John’s Wood that was going cheap. He and Joe were going to buy it, work up a tremendous business among the residents of the neighbouring flats, sell out at a profit, and start a showier place nearby, to which they would lure away the customers from the restaurant they had sold.
The only thing that was hindering the plan at the moment was that they did not have the money to buy the little restaurant.
‘To think of that stepfather of yours with all those dollars,’ Joe said wistfully. ‘You’d think he could spare us a few.’
‘He probably would, if I asked him,’ Virginia said.
‘Why don’t you then?’ asked Jack, fitting a cigarette into a chromium holder. ‘It’s not very charitable of you, my dear Virginia, to keep all that money to yourself.’
‘But I haven’t got any of it! And I don’t want it. I’ll never ask Spenser for help. I’ve told Joe that hundreds of times. You can’t understand that, because you don’t know the whole story, and anyway, you’ve got no principles. So you keep out of this, Jack. It’s none of your business.’
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Jack removed the long cigarette-holder from his mouth with a flourish, and funnelled two jets of smoke down his nose. ‘Very sorry, I’m sure,’ he said in the affected voice with which he thought he was imitating the way Virginia spoke. ‘We’re only trying to help you. Doing our best for the little woman, so she can be in the chips. It seems strange that you wouldn’t want to help our honest effort.’
‘Oh, leave her alone,’ Joe said. ‘I know how she feels about it. She’s got scruples. You and I don’t understand that. We’ve never been able to afford them. We’ll get the money all right. I’ve got a hunch something big is going to come up for me soon.’ He winked at Jack. Jack frowned, and just perceptibly shook his narrow, lizard-like head, and Virginia guessed with apprehension that they were up to something.
One evening when she went to the Excelsior on her way home from work to see if it was one of Joe’s nights to leave early, she found him talking to a cadaverous man in a tightly-belted raincoat. Joe was wiping down the counter in front of the man, and making the casual remarks he might have made to any customer, but there was something about the way the man looked at Joe that made Virginia think that this was not an ordinary exchange of pleasantries.
When Joe saw her, he came at once to the end of the counter where she sat. ‘You didn’t need to come tonight, Jin,’ he said, not smiling as he usually did when he saw her perching there.